Angina Monologue 15

Sometimes I wonder if there is really any hope for His Majesty.

They held quite a funeral for that police officer that was recently killed in the line of duty. That’s appropriate, of course. As a former political leader, I am in favor of anything which instills proper respect for the appointed guardians of order.

I wonder if it is even possible for His Majesty to say something like that and have it not come across as sarcastic. My own mourning is quite genuine. Police officers aren’t perfect, but this one was doing his duty the best he knew how when he was gunned down, apparently during a domestic violence call. The police officers I’ve known have all agreed that domestic violence calls are the worst.

Come to think of it, the reason my entire wardrobe now consists of Class C medical devices could reasonably be described as a domestic violence call: My wife conspired with a criminal suspect to kill me, and nearly succeeded. Hollywood has not, of course, presented that situation fairly.

It is a never-ending source of amusement to me to watch the American  dialog on race. It helps that I am a disinterested party: As the only Nubian on the planet, I am not a member of any recognized minority group and have no dog in the fight.

That’s not quite true. In his younger days, His Majesty could easily have passed as a northern European male. Of course, since the Jedi attempt to foil his (perfectly legal) assumption of power, His Majesty can’t help standing out in any crowd. It’s the eyes, I think.

In the normal run of politics, it is the Republicans who are constantly accused of racism, but never want to talk about race; and the Democrats who claim to be against racism, but are constantly talking about race.

When you have a situation like that, you can bet the moisture farm that both sides are dancing around a very large elephant in the living room.

This is illustrated by the stories about this slain officer. The community in which the officer serves is populated largely by an ethnic minority. This community is also noted for its high incidence of police calls for drunkenness and domestic disturbance. One of the newspaper stories was impolitic enough to bring this up, but then dropped it again as quickly as it possibly could.

His Majesty has disappointed me before, but this was just sad. I’ve noticed that some of the Star Wars myth makers, who feed on the distorted Lucas version of His Majesty’s career, have begun telling us that His Majesty was not just a tyrant and mass murder; far worse, they say, he was a racist. Careless talk by His Majesty can only feed this impression.

Up until now, I have not seen much to indicate any racist thinking on His Majesty’s part. He mistreats members of all races with perfect impartiality. So far as I can tell, the charges of racism have been based solely on the observation that all the stormtroopers and their officers were human. Well, that’s a historical accident, not a plan; His Majesty picked a skilled fighter to clone, who happened to be human, but he could as easily have picked a member of any other predatory race. Once the clone line was established, it made sense to keep cloning the same line; you save a lot of administrative costs when the plastic combat armor can all be the same size, the combat vehicles can be designed for crews with the same stature and number of limbs, the rations can all be prepared to meet the same biochemical requirements, and so on. This was still true to an extent even when combat losses forced His Majesty to begin replenishing the storm trooper ranks with wild-strain humans. (Who turned out to be incapable of shooting straight, with lamentable consequences.) Honestly, I’m not sure why other species would complain about not being given an equal opportunity to serve as His Majesty’s cannon fodder.

Lord Vader, do you really think it is racist to point out statistical disparities between communities that happen to be of different ethnicities?

No one believes that the Sith who highlights statistical disparities between different communities thinks that it is just happenstance that the communities are of different ethnicities.

Then aren’t they the ones who are racists, rather than I?

I do not myself think that these disparities are primarily genetic. Or, rather, while I think it possible that the differences in mean intelligence between different ethnicities are statistically significant, I do not believe they are socially significant. The distribution of intelligence is fairly broad, and the means for different ethnicities, for large enough samples, may differ more than can be accounted for by random chance (that is, be statistically significant) while still being much smaller than the standard deviation of the distribution for the population as a whole (that is, be socially insignificant.)

This is not to say that the disparities between communities of different ethnicities are not socially significant. When the murder rate within a community is ten times that of the general population, and remains so year after year, there is definitely a problem in that community. I just don’t think genetics is that significant a contributor.

The Democrats are well aware of this, and have made a lot of political capital from the claim that the differences result from institutionalized racism.

It is plausible that this was true in 1950. But it was becoming less true, and continued becoming less true until about 1960. Thereafter, the gap between ethnicities began to grow again, and the greater the efforts to end institutional racism, the more the gap grew.

It is always hard to pin down meaningful correlations in social statistics, let alone get the direction of causality right. It is harder still when you are unable to perform controlled experiments on large samples. The Democrats have made practically a fetish of ensuring that their social experiments are uncontrolled, by denigrating the whole concept of particularism and states’ rights and thereby ensuring that their social experiments take in the entire population. No control group. This is very bad science, but very good politics, particularly when you want the outcomes of the social experiments to be ambiguous enough that they can be spun however you like.

This is certainly true of social experiments like social insurance, affirmative action, and the like. But the trend I’ve seeing with the minimum wage is to force it up locally if it can’t be forced up nationally.

The minimum wage is an amusing case. There are actually Democratic economists who profess to believe it possible that raising the cost of labor will not affect how much labor is demanded, and may even increase the demand.  I found positively delicious the comments of a more skeptical economist, who pointed out that, if this was true, there was no scientific content to economics; and its proponents were nothing but “camp-following whores.” Unsurprisingly, the research purporting to support this claim has not stood up well to scrutiny.

I think that, in the long run, the employment consequences of raising the minimum wage will become undeniable. But by then the politicians profiting politically from raising it will be retired. For now, it is possible to raise the minimum wage in markets that already lack skilled workers, where the effects are masked; I’ve seen estimates that in some labor markets, less than 2% of workers are currently receiving minimum wage. It is also possible to raise minimum wage without immediate obvious effects in a highly inflationary market; and, despite the government’s best efforts to hide the face, there are tremendous inflationary pressures on the current U.S. economy.

But we’re letting the conversation drift away from the chief source of my present amusement, which is how we are having a furious discussion of race in which Democrats are in violent agreement with themselves and Republicans are heading for their storm shelters. And in which the rules of the discussion are rigged to prevent the discussion from actually going anywhere fruitful.

I fear that by “fruitful” His Majesty means in the direction of saying that there are serious problems with some minority communities.

There are.

The question is what to conclude from this, and what to do about it.

The fear of the Democrats is that any discussion of the problems in minority communities will turn into a discussion of their genetic and cultural inferiority. The fear of the Republicans is that any discussion of the problems in minority communities will turn into a discussion of social inequality.

I have already dismissed genetic inferiority. It is probably unimportant and it is impossible to do much about it anyway.

That leaves cultural inferiority and social inequality. And, do you know what? Both sides have much to fear.

I do not know if social inequality leads to cultural inferiority. It seems plausible, but there are two powerful counterarguments: the Jews and the Asians. I am quite certain, though, that cultural inferiority leads to social inequality.

It follows that the cultural inferiority should be addressed first. If this fails to lead to social equality — there is, after all, still a lot of antisemitism in the world — then we can address that next.

How are you supposed to address cultural inferiority, assuming it exists and is the problem, in a culture in which everything is about pride?  How do you tell the black community, for example, that a 70% illegitimacy rate is a serious cultural problem without falling afoul of Black Pride?

The Democratic solution, of course, is to redefine the problem away by insisting that the concern over illegitimacy simply reflects the arbitrary cultural mores of the privileged white patriarchy. By turning “patriarchy” into a pejorative, you invalidate the concern of lack of fathers in young black men’s lives. By turning “white” into a pejorative, you create a presumption that concern over illegitimacy rates is nothing but a mask for racism. And by turning “privileged” into a pejorative, you ensure that having a culture that is not dysfunctional disqualifies you from offering anything to a culture that is.

The Republican solution is to either break down pride or redefine it. One can quote any number of scriptures on the evils of pride, or at least one could if anyone paid attention to scriptures any more. The problems with this are manifold. One is the self-esteem movement, which although it has been more thoroughly and convincingly debunked by actual scientific evidence than almost any other theory in sociology, still has a lot of grip. The other is that the Republicans doing the preaching against pride are almost always better off than those they are preaching to, which is guaranteed to produce the appearance of being self-serving. You need preachers who are dirt-poor to preach against pride. And who is going to listen to the dirt-poor?

Plus the fact that street preachers seem more interested in preaching against the pride of those who have some reason for pride that in preaching against the pride of folks whose pride is obviously unjustified.

And the Republicans doing the preaching are mostly politicians, and nowadays the best place to look for psychopathic narcissists is among politicians. It’s practically a requirement for the career. I believe that, when it comes down to it, the reason Romney failed of election is that he was not sufficiently narcissistic. He should have studied the career of William Jefferson Clinton, the most popular Democratic politician elected within my lifetime.

The bottom line is that the humbling is going to come in a rather more impersonal form.

A second Flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere,
Or a cataclysmic earthquake, should create enough despair.

Huh. I had no idea His Majesty had ever watched 1776, let alone bothered to memorize any of it.

It is always wise to know your enemy.

But the humbling will come, whether by fire or sword.

His Majesty then gave that creepy cackling laugh of his and headed towards the television room. I believe his latest thing is the weather channel. Go figure.

His Majesty does not invite people into his home, so it does not surprise me that he does not mention what I believe is the real problem with race relations in this country.

It is fairly easy to invite Charles Brown, your neighbor who happens to be black, into your home. It is much harder to invite the entire black community, including the dysfunctional urban culture responsible for that 70% illegitimacy rate, into your home. No living room is that big.

But it’s big enough to invite just Charles Brown into.

In other words, and to paraphrase one of my favorite movies: You take men one at a time. The man who speaks in terms of the group is a peawit.